FC Gifu visited northern neighbours Zweigen Kanazawa in the Hakusan derby, but unfortunately were on the wrong end of a 2-1 defeat, by Stuart Smith.

FC Gifu (back row, left to right): Giffy, Kai, Fujitani, Maeda, De Vries, Sievers, Junior Barros; (front, left to right): Baba, Tsukagawa, Miyamoto, Abe (c), Takeda.

In the first half it was Kanazawa that had most of the play, and they went into half time 2-0 up thanks to goals from Ryuhei Oishi (penalty) and Yuki Kakita. In the second half, FC Gifu played much better and a goal from defender Tadashi Takeda, who bundled the ball in from close range, gave the team hope, but ultimately there was to be no equalizing goal.

Post game, coach Makoto Kitano said: “Thank you to all the supporters who came to Kanazawa. It is a painful defeat, and it came about in much the same way as the defeat against Avispa (Fukuoka) last week. When you concede first, you are forced to make more of the running in the game and that opens a lot of space up. But, we did create more chances in the second half, only scoring once is the regret we have. Right now, we have a big challenge in front of us and after the game I said to the players that the next game is a “must win” game – it doesn’t matter how it comes about.

As for the rest of the season, we still have games against our direct opponents in the table to come. I don’t want to put a number on the points I think we have to take in order to survive, but rather I’d like to take each game as it comes and try and win one game at a time.”

Midfielder Kota Miyamoto told reporters: “We made mistakes. Their goals came via our mistakes, and in the second half I think our opponents tried to sit back on their 2-0 lead instead of going for a third goal so it made it a bit more difficult for us to get back into the game. In training and meetings this week, we made it clear that we really had to try and keep a clean sheet – so in that sense we didn’t do a good job. Compared to last week (against Fukuoka) it wasn’t bad, but because we conceded it made it really difficult. In the game itself, we didn’t really isolate any of our opponents in order to gain a numerical advantage on them. We all had our individual tasks, but we really needed to avoid so many one-on-one situations.”

FC Gifu’s next game is at home to table-topping Kashiwa Reysol on Sunday August 25.